Use template or import file to generate structured e portfolios.

We work with about 1000 pre-service teaching students a semester while they are in their field experience or internships. We are currently using iWebfolio, and can have students generate portfolios using pre-built templates. Canvas would be a great environment for our students, but we foresee problems with them building out their portfolio sections. Please incorporate a feature that allows students to use a template to build their portfolios (or import a file that we have generated) so that they can focus on populating sections with content, rather than focusing on building the required, structured sections.

I am not a fan of the Canvas ePortfolios, and mostly because they are not particularly user friendly (teachers or students), and frankly are rather featureless!

That being said, I did find a similar idea archived for lack of votes that you can review at ePortfolio Templates When reviewing this one, please scroll down and read the comments made by Robin Bartoletti. I think you will find them interesting.

There are no similar current ideas, so I will recommend your be opened for voting during the next period and I will support it - ePortfolios need all the love they can get.

Since archived ideas can be re-submitted, your idea will be open for vote in the next voting cycle.

In the meantime, help your idea gain traction by posting a link to this idea in the comments of the other, archived idea (which will notify author and anyone who is following the idea) and share your idea to colleagues and peers as well.

I agree basically with what Kelley L. Meeusen says, but we have to use what we have, at least, and for that reason I'm voting this "up" as well. I hope that Instructure will decide to devote some time to improving the ePortfolios, but I gather it's on the back burner. But yes, individual templates would be nice!

The institution I'm working with is very interested in leveraging the ePortfolio in Canvas, without having to implement yet another 3rd party app. Let's all combine our efforts, please vote for these other ideas that are currently open for voting, and let's see if we can get Canvas behind this feature:

We would also very much like to move over to use Canvas for a course that requires ePortfolios but are unable to do so because of the lack of ability to provide templates for students. Until this is implemented we are restricted to using our current LMS and potentially 3rd party solutions, which does not make for a seamless student experience, which we were hoping we could deliver through Canvas, as it has ePortfolio provision built in, but the current tool is unfortunately far too basic and unstructured for our students to use both for formative use but also for assessment purposes and accreditation with an industry body with legal requirements. Students need guidance and support to use reflective tools such as these, and even the ability to add instructions to them would help massively.

Happy to vote this idea UP as we desperately need to see development in this area. ePortfolios are surely the way to go in supporting project based learning, personalised learning and staff CPD evidence to name but three features.

Linking badges to the portfolio would also be a huge step.

One option would be for Canvas to work with Mahara (the best open source eportfolio system around) to fix/develop/improve the LTI feature. There are many colleges and universities in the UK moving to Canvas that use Mahara that would appreciate this. Currently the version in the AppCentre is two years old.

eportfolio is not a feature that we have plans to advance in the next 6 months. Priorities can change, however I am confident enough that we will not be modifying eportfolios that I am going to archive this thread. Clearly eportfolios are a priority for you folks. I encourage you to continue having great discussions around eportfolios so we can continue gathering data which in return drives our priorities.

We looked at this for our students, but I am not sure how this would work for faculty evaluation and promotion dossiers, which need specific elements in a certain order. Any suggestions would be helpful!

The ePortfolio tool is useful but the look and feel an the completed pages is spartan. It would be awesome if there were a way to choose from several themes for the ePortfolio appearance, much as you can choose a WordPress theme. There could be a cottage industry of Canvas theme developers, or, at minimum, the institution could provide a few different options for students and faculty to choose from.

Thank you for your inquiry. This idea is not on the scope of any current projects. Please continue to follow this thread and updates will be added if/when they are available. You can also follow Canvas Studio to see some of the ongoing priorities.

We also would like to be able to add a template, but we want to use e-Portfolios for faculty/instructor dossiers for promotion and evaluation. We used Blackboard previously, and trust me, not only students have difficulty building out their portfolio sections etc! It is true, we want them them to concentrate on building content, not the structure of the portfolio. Also, we need a way to import/migrate the artifacts from Blackboard to Canvas (not only for the courses, but for the portfolios!) And, we need a way to have our Evaluation and Promotion peer review committee access them to 'grade'.

Ditto to this request to make it possible to use templates (or import zip files) in ePortfolio!!

I see it's been a couple of years since the voting on this idea... and some of us still need/want/hope for this option in the Canvas ePortfolio tool! Any chance it may get reconsidered or moved forward in 2018?

Having the ability to setup a pre-defined structure/template here is literally the deciding factor between us using this tool, or recommending that students use wordpress or similar. We want to use this but we know it'll get messy if we don't provide a template.

This change will only impact the stage sort of this idea and will not change how it is voted on or how it is considered during prioritization activities. This change will streamline the list of ideas 'open for voting', making it easier for youto see the true top voted ideas in one sort,here.

It would also be great if we could make and distribute portfolios that represent outcomes/standards to all students on the back end. Then teachers could insert representative work into the ePortfolio. Currently, the ePortfolio model would not work effectively for K-5 environment.

We've received requests from users in our district for an ePortfolio tool for elementary students and Language Arts courses across grade level. They want a tool that integrates with Canvas so students can drop in their existing assignments. I haven't been able to find any external tools that have this functionality and are appropriate for elementary-aged students. Most of the tools seem to be setup to help higher ed students demonstrate job readiness skills. The existing ePortfolio has many shortcomings, one of which is the lack of structure students have in creating a portfolio. Allowing teachers or schools to create a template that could be initiated from a course or by an account admin would help provide structure and uniformity to class portfolios. There are a number of questions, conversations, and feature requests in the Community, but when you search Canvas Studio, there's no past or present work that's been done to improve the ePortfolio feature. Paper portfolios are widely used in K12, it's really a shame that Canvas isn't improving its digital portfolio tool for users.